If I had to guess, the reason green gets less attention when it comes to their bonkers value generation is that while their color’s method of “cheating” mainly affects their own side of the board, the other four colors “cheat” in ways that do more to interfere with the game plans of other players (not R as much as WUB but their speed is still something). It’s a lot easier to get pissed off at the jerk across the table who just void rended your commander than the green player next to them who can’t even see your commander over their pile of creatures and lands.
That’s personally exactly why I like playing green. It’s very self contained. I will not interact with you, *I AM* the threat to be interacted with. I much prefer being the early threat then being the guy who has to say no to the early threat
Yeah, but like Maldhound is saying, compare the reactions to playing Torbran and playing Harrow. Torbran gets nuked immediately, Harrow gets an appreciative nod. While in actual gameplay effect, Torbran only helps red cope a little better with 40 vs. 20 life nerf a lot of their cards receive, where Harrow means I'm throwing down a creature bigger than their whole deck while my opponents are just getting started. (Harrow is so fucking good)
Also red was pretty good at resource denial in ye olden days of magic i.e. Blood Moon or Smoke. Play those and watch the hate you get. I run them both in my Norin's Prison deck and man do people get salty.
i once saw a guy talk about how the thing commander players value the most is feeling like they are 'getting to play' or 'do the thing'. they wanna draw cards, cast spells, combo off or see the synergies in their deck in play and if they don't win thats ok but if you stop them from ever doing the thing or make it so they don't get to draw cards or have a cool turn that's when they get pissy. green will slam you like a monster but it doesn't directly stop you from doing the thing, which the other colors in excess all tend to do, i think thats why it gets forgiven.
I wasn't looking for ur comment, but I'm glad I found it, and going off of my post-gane sentiments, I 100% agree. I only recently got into commander, but iirc I've been my most salty when I had a game where I felt I "didn't get to do anything" or didn't get my engine online. (Or directly targeted due to base power of my deck compared to the res tof the room/someone dropping a piece of repeatable hate and saying it's specifically for me.)
@@PsychoDiesel48 this is true recently I was playing a month local of mana deck and basically made a blue player feel useless because I went to cast Early harvest to un tapp all basic lands after playing a mass land search and it got counted then played a bear umbra attacked then untapped all my lands any way . Then proceeded to play vorinclex (the mean mana one ) and retry wilderness reclamation to untap my land again . Next turn someone plays a board wipe and I heroic intervention green truly is resilient
I'm here for the two colour roast because my fav colour combo is Simic. Despite his blue love, he hates Simic most of the guilds. ... And I get it because we are disgustingly good at "cheating".
Green gets by because most people are on the boat of “but it’s fun making big things go sideways”. My guy, it’s magic, almost all of us are trying to make big things go sideways.
The way I look at it, if you're willing to look me in my eyes from across the table and proceed to piece together a convoluted haste combo of craterhoof and a billion tokens that cost you 21 mana and some life and tell me that that's the best you could come up with, I'm willing to let you. And then I'll cast cyclonic rift and nothing happened at all for the 10 minutes it took to assemble that combo, according to the boardstate at eot.
I’d argue that Black’s way of cheating is more that of all the colors, they have the most ways use non-standard resources to pay for stuff, combined with an ability to use their graveyard in ways that other colors mostly can’t. Often, their cards are way cheaper and/or more powerful than normal, but they come with a cost or drawback (a lot of Demon creatures, for example, or things like Phyrexian Negator). Other times, they just pay with life instead of mana. And of course, they get to use their graveyard as a resource in addition to their hand and library. To continue the analogy of real money that Mald uses, green pays for their shit by being rich (ramp spells) and exploiting the labor of their underlings (mana dorks), while black doesn’t necessarily have much money, but when it comes time to pay, black either flashes some cleavage and goes “surely there must be some other way to pay”, or they go dumpster diving (graveyard stuff), or they start selling organs on the black market.
I would argue that White does an equal if not occasionally better job of using their graveyard. Black/White is the ressurection colors, but Black is all about ritualistic sacrifice, while white costs more, but ultimately doesn't particularly try to nickel and dime you otherwise. It is a balance: Doomed Necromancer is sacrificed to bring back my Sun Titan, who enters the battlefield bringing back my Doomed Necromancer. It is like Jesus, you only need to kill him a little bit, just keep him under a rock for a few days kinda thing.
Personally I see black as being able to do almost all the things that every other color can do. Black can draw, board control, go wide buff, drop fatties, ramp, combat tricks, evasion, the list goes on and on. Everything that is a staple in other colors (and is their 'thing') black can do, just not as well in isolation. Where black _really_ shines is when it's paired with another color to both buff it's strengths and shore up it's weaknesses.
My guess is that green gets more of a pass since it is more focused on building itself instead of messing with everyone else and that green mainly wins by hitting face, which is inefficient at winning in commander (hence why cEDH is combo focused)
I recently did a BG booster game with friends and made a green blue deck. No one bated an eye at my scary monsters or having 8 mana turn 3, but one counterspell and everyone lost their mind lol. This man speaks the truth
Green also doesn't play many alternate win conditions or much interaction, Green's removal is mostly based on enchantment/artifact/flying hate and it's only way to deal with creatures on the other side of the table is to have creatures themselves. Green does have access to infect; one of it's few alternate win conditions but all of the colors have access to poison counters at this point and it shares that mostly with Black. Green's at it's scariest when it's strengths get to be mixed with the other colours' tool boxes.
Green has highly efficient artifact and enchantment removal, a nonzero amount of targeted land hate, creature removal in every set, and more spells that are particularly excellent at disabling commanders than anything but blue. Green probably has the best overall interactive suite of any color except white.
Yeah, when I read 'Green doesnt have interaction',@@Kestral287, I almost spit up my drink. They have THE MOST COMBAT TRICKS in the game and they've been consistently given all the tools they traditionally didn't have--card draw, creature removal, even fucking COUNTERSPELLS.
@@varsoonhks3211What instant speed creature removal do they have that isn't using creatures? Asking because I'm building a mono green deck and I might as well use this heated argument as tips
You're going to need a creature for all bite and fight effects--even just something as simple as those one green cost deathtouchers are worth running if that's the route you take,@@dom6637. When I am talking about Green kill spells, that's more of what I mean; Green decks will usually have creatures, being able to just say "Well now I can do targeted kill spells too" on top of that feels a bit cruel. Otherwise (and this will be mostly flying hate, or to deal with Enchantment Creatures or Artifact Creatures)--Aerial Predation, Aerial Volley, Beast Within, Broken Wings, Choose Your Weapon, Crash Landing, Crushing Canopy, Crushing Vines, Eaten by Spiders, Fell the Pheasant, Forced Landing, Gloomwidow's Feast, Leaf Arrow, Mistakes Were Made, Pierce the Sky, Pistus Spike, Plummet, Return to the Earth, Ruinous Intrusion, Run Afoul, Siggatars' Volley, Shower of Arrows, Shredding Winds, Slingbow Trap, Sundering Vitae, Tangletrap, Thornado, Ettercap's adventure, Green Slime. Most popular of these is, of course, Beast Within, which sees play in a ton of Green decks.
I almost died when you flashed Zada on screen, I legit have had her pop off with Storm Kiln Artist once and said “woah I gotta let this one cool off for a while” and proceeded to not play that deck for months so people at the LGS will actually play with me.
@@MrClearlink so Zada pops off with the lint in your pocket, a paper clip, and two goblins. Her ability makes it so the millions of terrible spells in red suddenly become incredible spells. Things like “target creature can’t block, draw a card”. Now you’re drawing for each creature you have on the field. You can make a Zada deck that demolishes tables for like $20. Red was a crime and god simply hasn’t caught on yet.
I got accused of war crimes the last time my Zada deck popped off. I went from 5 mana and like 10 creatures to 130 treasures (we stopped counting) and 30+ creatures on turn 5.
Man...I miss my Zada deck. I'd be like "Guys, look at my cute little goblins, oh I drew a cantrip...so you know what that means: ya die and I draw 60 cards"
As a predominantly green player thank you, I feel seen. That said, I deserve it. Between black killing the cool stuff, white and red killing everything, and blue just saying no: my shit only goes off if the fun police distract each other long enough (that they don't kill my 29 power champion of lamholdt, that I kept talking about and put at the front of my board so they wouldn't forget)
As a green player myself, I think it's because our strategy tends to be more solitaire, building up something that then breaks into your side of the board, as opposed to other colours that are more suited for interaction; If you're against Green, your own board state is safer from their cheating.
When blue, black, or white try to play solitaire, they're derided for "not trying to play the game". When green and red play solitaire, calling them out is met with the response "play more creatures then".
And then there's me, a devout lover of all things Colorless. My Karn, Legacy Reforged deck is so much fun, people are confused the first time they see it but once I get my own mana base going, get some key artifacts out, and start getting things fast, it's honestly quite formidable. And of course I'm also in the process of working on an Eldrazi tribal deck as well.
Green gets away with it because it's typically the easiest to deal with out of other colors cheating in my opinion. I've found it's easier to blow up/exile Green's creatures and destroy their doublers than it is to: Proactively play around White's hatebears and tax effects Outmaneuver Blue's counterspells and tap effects Successfully stop every single one of Black's tutors (or ultimately stop what they tutored for) Predict when Red goes from being kinda cute and quirky to being the actual game ending threat
But the biggest part of the problem is the ramp, and green is the only color that gets land ramp, which because land destruction is soft banned in commander can’t really be dealt with
@declanmadden6058 I mean...reds all about that land destruction but nobody wants to have that on their table. Land destruction is a VIABLE way to control green. But everyone gets salty when you bring it out.
@@declanmadden6058 As a green player I agree that our ramp is your problem however this issue is solvable when you think about it yes we ramp fast but can we still keep up when we don't have powerful card draw, tutoring, cheating mana and damage, and quantity of creatures and hatebears. the only thing makes green powerful is other color combinations hence why a green player somehow hates to go mono-green because they also want your toys. don't hate the mono-green hate the one who uses SIMIC.
@@Circu_ch "We don't have card draw" sure, okay, Beanstalk totally doesn't exist, Collected Company doesn't cheat up bodies, y'all have plenty of shit to go hard with you just pretend its not real or not good, you guys get the best or second best quantity and quality of bodies in most situations
@@Circu_ch casually lies so you can continue to bamboozle the new magic players into the "Green is okay" cult. Return of the Wildspeaker, Rishkar's expertise, Shamanic Revelation, Beast Whisperer, Tribute to the world(speaker? might be tree) off the top of my head draws extraordinarily well, you can tutor creatures and lands including non basics (GAEAS CRADLE), Vigor for damage and tons of cards to make creatures cost less, and multiple token doubling effects. Green real weakness is creature removal AND THEIR CREATURES ARE STRONGER ANYWAYS. Don't just hate the green players burn down their forest and murder their dinos
I think part of why green gets away with it and something like blue doesn't is based off of a lot of people playing low power or bad decks. A bad green deck ramps a little and just plays some okay creatures every turn till they empty their hand. A bad blue deck puts up a fog bank and counters everything remotely threatening with literally no game plan to actually win or while hoping to find that singular card in the 99 that does something. Just based off my experiences though, yours might differ.
the reason green gets away with it is because green isn't taking actions away from other people. green actively incentivizes players to be proactive about dealing with it because the longer you don't, the bigger the problem becomes until you can't deal with it anymore. conversely, the reason blue gets so much hate (sometimes undeserved but only sometimes) is because blue takes actions away from people which often feels more unfair even if it actually might not be, incentivizing players to be more passive and reactive which has a tendency to create a game state centered around noninteraction until someone decides they have enough shit to burn through however many "nopes" they think the blue player has in their hand and additionally this is also why simic is the most hated of all because it forces you to do both at the same time with seemingly very little meaningful trade off either way getting your action stuffed by gaea's blessing doesn't feel as bad as when your opponent casts negate on you even if the net result for both situations ends up being functionally the same. when a green player has untapped mana on your turn, you're wondering what he's planning. when a blue player has untapped mana on your turn, you're rolling your eyes because you know exactly what's coming
Green isn't taking actions away? Lol, say hello to mirriad of Fog effects or wide array of artifact removal or cards that shutdown opponent attempts to kill Greens creatures via giving them hexproof and/or indestructable with upsides like DRAWING CARDS FOR EACH CREATURE with a +1/+1 counter on it or my personal "favourite" card - Questing Beast. Oh you are playing a token deck? Or relying on fog effects to survive? Or you thinking that Teferi's Protection will save you? Cute.
@@InquisitorSinCross iirc Teferi's Protection actually works, since it doesn't nullify damage, it just says your Life can't change, which is a completely different thing from preventing damage Still pops all those turbofog effects
@@syrelian depends. If Questing Beast is your commander or you cast Triumph of the Hordes, then Teferi's Protection won't work, because of how rules work: commander damage and poison counters don't care if your opponent's life total changed
It's painful how true this is. "They will never talk about how the green player is put forth as the Timmy, the everyman, when they are in fact the bourgeois. They are taking the same game actions and getting paid double." BARS!
Jokes on green aside I think this brings up an interesting point about the social dynamics of the color pie in Commander. Green is often considered the big mana lol timmy style deck and as such has been given a lot of extra tools over time to where its now widely considered to be the top dog in the format. Yet we still treat it like the lol timmy color thats just trying to have fun.
To be faaaaair if you go high enough on the power scale (cedh) green arguably becomes the worst color in the game. So I don't know about "top dog", but I respect the sentiment.
@@Duransurik when you play no holds barred, its simply too slow. Having to have multiple pieces that can generate landfall triggers and take advantage of them is worse than just draw half your deck and win the game with loads of fast mana and free counter spells, on turn 3. Green does have good cards, but as a whole, when they dont have time to set up, the colour gets a lot worse.
@@stylesheetra9411 CEDH is kind of its own thing. I still see green played in CEDH. Its never on its own but its certainly a part of the format. Out side of CEDH though Green is very omnipresent. Which is what a majority of the Commander players actually play.
Honestly, I feel like Blue's cheating isn't denial, it's their massive card draw. Green gets more mana and such while blue gets more cards in hand. And people don't really complain about card draw (at least not that much). Denial is just a thing that they can do.
I think part of it is that it's really weird in a game about spellcasters that only 1 colour gets general counter magic ( I guess black very rarely does with a cost too but cheating with a cost was Black's thing in early Magic ) Card Draw feels way more like an appropriate cheat.
Is blue actually better at drawing cards though? Black gets better card draw than blue. It costs life, but Night's Whisper is better than Divination. And Green gets better draw too. It interacts in some way with their creatures, but Rishkar's Expertise is better than Opportunity. Blue's biggest failing is that it hasn't been able to show people how bad its card draw actually is.
@@Kestral287 There might be individual examples with better draw in either of those, but blue's the one that has some form of card draw on every third card, and then gets to do stuff because of that draw as well.
@@Kestral287Between their widespread access to Scrying, as well as the sheer number of blue cards that allow you to draw cards, Blue is arguably better on average at drawing cards than any other color, even if a well-constructed black deck that builds around it can potentially match or even exceed your average blue deck. Furthermore, Blue has by far the most synergies with card draw; they have creatures that scale in power with the size of your hand, ways of turning decking out into a win-con like Thassa’s Oracle, ways of making their own card draw boosts their creatures, or force their opponent to mill, or manipulating the top of their deck with things like Fact or Fiction.
I think it's because green keeps to itself while doing it's thing. Honestly blue and white are the main colours I see hate for. Black and red are considered chill and in the same boat as green in my play spaces.
My mono green commander deck with Vorinclex and insane mana ramp doesn't allow me to cheat my cards out.... hides the Monster Manual, Dramatic Entrance, Quicksilver Amulet, Planar Bridge, Elvish Piper out of sight along with Mana Reflection, Nyxbloom Ancient.
From your explanation it seems like the key to Green being forgiven is because it's method of cheating doesn't directly interfere with your own cheating. You leave Green Bay it's devices and 4 turns in its got an army or a Colossus on it's side. But during those 4 turns the opponent is still able to build their own side or attempt to decimate Green before they're too big
Well, when your main way to interact with other players' board state is to send big, stompy dinosaurs to smash their stuff into puddles of goo, you get a bit more of a pass than the people either making your stuff just disappear or the people that keep you from doing stuff in the first place.
go wide, go tall, insane draw, and they kinda have countermagic in their protection spells - veil of fucking summer anyone? and on top of this yeah being the mana colour is too imbalanced
I feel like part of the "cheating" not feeling as bad is due to green mostly focusing on itself and that player. {Heck, I've gone back in writing to add this before posting the comment to say that honestly what can be said for green can be said for black and red in this video. The only two unfun colors are blue and white, the other two "cheats" don't seem that bad, and I've never experienced the complaints for the other colors that way} Sure, there are removal spells in green, but they don't tend to be as good as non-green counterparts. Green is ramping themselves so they can play, but as you've pointed out with the other colors: Blue - countering someone else's play, preventing them from doing anything. Otherwise bouncing or forever tapping, yet again completely denying someone's ability to play their cool stuff. White - removal and stax, your first example is "lands don't untap, only untap one in upkeep" which completely prevents people from playing the game as a whole. I don't see as much complaining with white when it comes to things like Gandalf despite their value. Everything else that enforces rules are stax pieces, and people don't like stax except for the stax player. Isn't it fun only being able to cast one spell each turn? Costing more hurts everybody but the green player, and even still a green ramp player probably wants their mana efficiently used, so once again: stax no like. The "fun hater" isn't unwarranted, you *are* preventing or slowing down the game to a grinding halt. That's not to say all games need to be fast or cEDH, by no means, but we're all trying to sit down and play a fun game, not mindless boring torture as you're waiting for t18 to cast a card you'd otherwise be able to play on t6. Black - Eh, this one's basically just green's benefit but streamlined. It does make the game more linear, but that's not a problem unless you make it a problem, and even still a lot of decks want to focus on one or two strategies anyway so this is just speeding it up. The things I see that black also has is a lot of reanimate/grave spells, which I think was a missed point here. I feel like the same arguments made for black fall well in line with green, it's just self focused in *this* case, but black also has a lot of murder/removal, discarding, regen, evasion, sacrifice, life loss/drain, I feel like the cheat here was the wrong focus. Red - Their cheat is Krenko and nothing more. Or, oof, ouchie, my ping damage! Wait, it was doubled? TRIPLED?! AND DOUBLED AGAIN?! I dunno, I think this was another missed opportunity for the complaint department, the ephemeral take is basically in line with black which means it's basically in line with green. When you're focused on advancing your board and plays it's fine, but when you're focused on stopping other people's board and play that's not fun. I think it's important that people encounter these issues so they can build better decks, but at the end of the day it's just not fun to be on the receiving end of "I know we all agreed to play, but I'm going to specifically prevent you from playing until I win by attrition." All that is to say, blue and white feel justified in their cheating complaints, but black and red don't feel as bad. Jund players win, I guess.
I will put forward that I want to play with your group, because I have been targeted due to a single Rampant Growth while the Blue player has an enchantment that lets them draw six cards a turn.
An even greater crime than the existence of such a blue card is the fact that this egregious nonsense doesn't even tell me *which* of those cards you're referring to
As someone who has played Green for pretty much the entirety of Commander's history, the main problem now (it started more like 6-7 years ago) is that the quality of the cards you're able to play is ridiculously higher than it used to be and there are a lot better options for playing 3+ colors. When every set has 50+ busted Legendary Mythics, you're drowning in options. Used to be that you sacrificed consistency for access to more tools, and there were way fewer efficient mana rocks or mana doublers, and a lot of them were either for Red or were Symetrical (Gauntlet of Power, Heartbeat of Spring, etc). Nowadays you rarely see a GREEN deck, it's just being used to finance all of the other busted shit in the 4 and 5 color decks. So if you're opting to not play Green, then you're kneecapping yourself from the start. It *shouldn't* be like that, but it's still the general rule.
As a primarily blue player (dunno why it's what I'm known for at my lgs), I find a lot of people get way more mad at a counter spell than they do at ramp or doubling up on stuff. I've watched it from my own games, people reacted more explosively (positive and negative) to my counter spells than they did to my Bright-Palm shenanigans. You'd think a suddenly 11 commander damage swing out of nowhere is much more noteworthy than a single counter spell but I've been made the threat more for the latter. That said, I like that each color has a specific way to cheat at the game. It makes things more interesting especially when the colors are mixed together. Mind you, rainbow decks are all either jank or every possible way to cheat all at once
I've never understood the hate someone gives over a counter spell. Like it's called interaction!!! What did you expect me to just sit here and let you play solitaire?
Iirc, there was a time when green's options were "little guy that produced more mana", "combat trick", "enchantment to make a guy trampler/hit harder", and "Expensive 4/4s, or higher". Over time they started eating White's token and counter duplication and rule cheating, black's restorations (sortof, through regeneration) and tutors, some of red's keywords like haste and direct damage (through fighting), and blue's keywords like hexproof or flying. Usually with the excuse that "yeah, nature does that". Because nature does everything if you look hard enough. Also green gets away with the mana thing because its meaningless until its *used* for something. Its like stockpiling guys with white. You can have 1000 1/1s and people will be like "holy shit we should do something about that" but unless you attack with them nobody's really going to care probably. And because of all the times green's had all the mana and jack to do with it people forgive it.
As a green player to me the main weakness of the color is that it can be rather fragile albeit scary, as green tends to run very creature-centric strategies, and there are infinitely more ways to deal with creatures than with other card types such as enchantments and instants/sorceries. That being said, the value engines in green are still absolutely ridiculous and I like and agree with the perspective of "every color cheats differently"
The counterpoint to that is, green is literally the color that deals with those non-creatures better than any other color. Nobody else kills artifacts and enchantments as easily as green. Nobody else kills creatures as easily as green. Nobody else kills planeswalkers as easily as green.
@@dontmisunderstand6041 Black and white have better creature removal by a wide margin. hell in 60 card 1v1 red and blue do better because they unlike green in 99% of creatures don't need a board to deal with yours. planeswalkers as best dealt with by red as haste creatures mean you can start punching them faster than other colors and blue and white have a lot of fliers. Green's thing is it has the best creatures for the lowest cost really good ways to interact with noncreature permanents and is decent at everything else but that can feel insane if they're set up. However, that applies to pretty much every color as they can all accomplish nuts things with setup. Green is just disliked in mid power because it's the best at enabling bullshit in ways your opponents don't interact with. once lands are in play most people don't run much if any ways to interact with them
@@jmanwild87 Most green creature removal costs 1 mana. For more than that you get extra on top of the removal. If green doesn't have creatures on board, it means they haven't had a turn since the last board wipe was cast. Having a board presence isn't something to worry about when considering the quality of removal, because no amount of removal will prevent you from losing if you don't have anything yourself.
@dontmisunderstand6041 Most green creature removal also requires you to have a creature that is as big or bigger than what you're trying to out whether it be a fight or bite spell Which in commander is more difficult than it sounds and leaves you very open for 2 for 1s.
@@jmanwild87 Multiplayer is an entirely different format where you'd be stupid to play ANY 1 for 1 removal, because it puts you down a card against everybody you didn't just piss off. A 3 for 1 is the bare minimum removal needs to be to be worth playing AT ALL in a 4 player format. And even then, you're still down on mana to break even in card advantage with a 3 for 1. Like I already said, you have a board presence, or removal already doesn't matter in the first place. So requiring a board presence to cast your removal isn't a big deal.
I honestly think that there are other instances where red gets hated. It's usually because of one of three things: 1) it's unpredictable and explosive, and usually wins come out of nowhere. Like I dumped my hand in one turn and banfire you for 46, or I just made infinite goblin tokens with haste from a couple cards that weren't even in my hand last turn. 2) it's usually too random. Things get exhiled and replaced by random stuff, which usually throws everything off (Chaos Warp, Thibalt's trickery, etc) 3) Land destruction. It shares this trait with white but red's land destruction is more consistent and usually more punishing (Obliterate, Jokulhaups)
The real issue is that the counterplay to green is to use mass land destruction to destroy the absurd advantage they generate, but that counterplay is banned from most tables not playing cEDH.
I imagine Green gets to get away with it for a lot od the playerbase between focusing on creatures that in theory are easy to interact with and having been arguably the overall weakest color for the majority of the game's life given how weak creatures *used* to be. A lot of people also just like "battlecruiser" _Magic_ (as long as they're not losing to it). How Green keeps getting away with it with WotC, on the hand, is the more mystifying thing even as easy that would be to blame solely on WotC under Hasbro only caring about money, game balance be damned. I still don't under why the anti-artifact color somehow has the most Treasure (and to a degree Food and Clue) creation now, but whatever.
Ah, I love the simple little card Rabbit Battery. A 1 drop with haste that can be attached to another creature to give it it's stats including haste, almost like a "pay 1 extra mana for your creature to give it haste" it's so reliable
Well, there is one color that is better at mana generation than green : Colorless. Sol Ring, Mana Fault, Lotus Petal, Jeweled Lotus, Relic of Sauron, Arcane signet, and so on... Kinda sad that a color that is not even a color gets to do green better than green.
So one of my current EDH decks I have right now is a mono-green deck where all the cards in the deck aside from basic snow forests specifically mentions +1/+1 counters in the card text. So it doesn't use Kaldheim Vorinclex or Doubling Season or anything that talks about being Modified, just cards that care about specifically +1/+1 counters. Since there are so many Hardened Scales effects in green, it can get silly if you just don't interact with me at all...but since green has very little ways to protect its own stuff as it is, and with my deck conditions removing most of those options, it's very easy to put me out of the game super early with just one or two removal spells, heaven forbid a board wipe. This is the first of the REAL two reasons Green as a solo color gets excused for it's version of cheating: it almost ALWAYS wins via combat damage of big chonky creatures, yet has very few ways to protect them without splashing in another color. Hexproof and Indestructible are merely secondary evergreen keywords when it comes to Green, but even with Archetype of Endurance/Asceticism or similar effects and maybe an Eldrazi Monument, what is Green's answer to mass exile? What is greens answer to single or mass sacrifice? Tajuru Preserver is about it, and for more options you need to splash into White usually, but that doesn't even take into account that Green doesn't have much of an answer to even just single target removal most times...and when White, Blue and Black and pay 1-2 mana to deal with your creature easily and your creatures that are actually a huge threat cost upwards of 6 mana, maybe it's a good thing Green ramps the best. The second and arguably bigger reason that Green is excused of their flavor of cheating is that Green has very little interaction with the other colors and has little to no removal. Green shines a bit when it comes to removing artifacts and enchantments, sure, but creatures and spells on the stack? Outside of Beast Within and Ezuri's Predation, your creatures are gonna stay unless they have a big creature and some sort of fight effect...and the spells are just gonna resolve as they are.
Its cause with green we get to watch it happen. Red we blink and lose, blue we blink and nothing has changed. Black is being a magician and pulling cards out of their deck by naming them and white says that card you have in your hand is staying there for a bit. Green is just Boom a man dork, boom a combo piece, boom another combo piece, boom a monstrosity now deal with it.
I think what most people hate the other colors but forgive green for is that other colors, blue especially, cheat by not letting you play the game. Which is alot more annoying than someone just getting mana quickly, like yeah you'll still lose but at least you're allowed to play a card without that guy going "I have a response" again and again
Shigeki and his fog effects are sending their regards. "Oh, you want to finish the game with damage? Tough luck - I have a response: fog. Oh it was in my graveyard? No problem, I'll just recur it, so I'll never run out of responses. Oh and btw, all you did in this game was meaningless, because I've ramped so hard, that I'm gonna win with Helix Pinnacle".
In Commander specifically, the way green cheats is much more impactful than in the 2-player, 60-card formats that most of their cheatiest cards were designed for, WHILE ALSO being viewed as more thematically appropriate for the format. Because Commander is supposed to be the format where you get to play your big stupid stuff that's too slow or too inconsistent for regular competitive formats.
This is your daily reminder to jam Confounding Conundrum into every deck with blue. It doesn't deny landfall triggers and it doesn't blow up lands. It merely prevents the green X landfall deck from triggering their 2,000,000 landfalls AND ramping as a side effect. If your deck dies to confounding conundrum, you failed during deckbuilding. Its a card that lets you deny people ramp without being accused of MLD (though I've still experienced a lot of salt for playing it)
I mean, most cards have their managen system. Greens is just more permanent. Black: Mana advantage through ritualistic sacrifice. White: Mana advantage through graveyard bullshit but with less life cost and more mana cost. (I run Sefris, which is what you call "Graveyard Legos." and I would agree, because my Cataclysmic Gearhulk makes it so that at the end of it I take a bowling ball and drop it on the Millenium Falcon I just spent the last hour building in exchange for dropping the same bowling ball on everyone else's Millenium Falcons too. The thing is I have the Master Builder cheat on, so while everyone else is piecing together it at a regular speed I am building like a commercial. The number of times I have used a Doomed Necromancer to bring back Sun Titan who enters the battlefield bringing back doomed necromancer is too goddamn often) Blue: Pay your cheating in installments with Fortell. You can bring out 8 mana cost cards turn 6. Arguably the weakest of the managen, but it is managen. in its own right Colorless: Colorless is like if green wanted to be androids rather than furries. Their manadorks are just not capable of defense and are capable to go into anybody's deck. They also get free shit like it is Vantablack Friday. Green's thing is around land gen. How often do they get a card that gives discounts to other cards? Or get to bring back creatures for free? They may be grinding through their deck to pay all the costs they can, but of all the colors they actually do pay sticker price. You are absolutely right though that Green has a tendency to fly under the radar against the edgelords and the blue wizards and the fireballs.
This is why Sultai is my favorite color combination in Commander. I get more resources to spend, the things I spend them on are exactly the things that I want at the moment, and I get to decide if the others at the table get to do the things they want. It’s a great way to be relevant for the entirety of a long four person game
While you are correct, every color cheats at least a little. I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the only colors that don't stick their fingers in other people's business all the time in commander is green and red, which for a lot of players makes them "the most fair" colors in commander.
Sorry about this long take in advance, but my love for this game has roused it out of me. When your argument is based around [fair = all the time], be sure to check how much time you have been given. Red and green seem fair in Commander because the format innately changes the equation to discourage aggression by a factor of 6. The format favours combo, but passively discourages it, because the more time it takes to explain the steps the less agency people feel. The game already has a time dilation of a factor of 2, and when you add in bureaucracy that factor painfully inflates. And then we get to white. If there are four white players in a game of commander there's a [fair] chance everyone is standing around letting the angels fly around unabated until the inevitable nuke is dropped and all the taxes left in the world are gathered by the player who was masochistic enough to delay their gratification. And that nuke wasn't the first, it was Beethoven's 5th. If you are fortunate enough to have the option to play a game of commander with more than 4 people, I hope that everyone involved loves the game of Magic as much as the people from Loading Ready Run do, because to undertake that game is as mentally and socially taxing as a United Nations meeting. Magic is a game complex enough to be Turing complete and it's why I fell in love with it, but what makes it fair is what everyone contributes to the experience. So according to my experience of the game, the privilege of seeing the win conditions of each deck involved and seeing what those decks can create together makes me think that blue is the fairest colour in Commander, because when your win condition is to see the complete life of a game flash before your eyes, you want that life to be as awesome as it can be for all players involved. And Blue has the ability to restore the most amount of [life] in the game, because life is memery.
White And Blue get fairly hated on. Yes it sucks getting your neck tap danced on by a big ass Dino but at least you had every opportunity to prevent it. If the White or Blue play locks down the game turn then they might as well have just said "Only im allowed to have fun" till the table collectively agrees beat their board in the back of a Denny's
I think the big difference is that green is usually playing very "fair". Green doesn't prevent you from taking game actions, it doesn't remove your spells from the stack, it doesn't wipe the board, it's slower than red so you have more time to react to it. Green gives you ample opportunity to respond to whatever they're doing in a way other colors often don't. I think the issues typically arise when it's used in combination with colors that prevent their opponents from effectively interacting with them (eg white and blue). Because then they're sitting there saying "ohh, ohh, i'm doing this scary thing, you better stop me!" and when you try they go "nope" and then kill you next turn.
Except Green can "nope" without the help of other colors: fogs, hexproof, indestructable, removal of any permanent (repeatable). Most of greens interaction is not that widespread when compared to other colors if we are talking about what people generaly think when talking about interaction, but it's there and can blindside the whole table.
This is why I play Rielle. I get to discard a bunch of cards only to double my hand size to satiate my obsession with drawing lots of cards and having a big hand. Grandma Rielle can later go in swinging her big staff like a big green beater. Few things are as satisfying as taking everone else out with different win conditions, beat out one in a single swing and burn someone for 20 with Fateful Showdown and doubling back with Flashbacking Conflagrate
Green gets by because they’re not preventing anyone from playing the game until they forcibly remove a player. Blue’s interaction says no. White says pay more. Black says we all sacrifice things and I don’t care. Red jumps over the table and punches you. Green is just the one that has the back foot longest. That said I play WUBRG and the most useful cards for the wincon for post midlife crisis Jodah are the green ones sooooooo
Good deconstruction of the Commander format. However, as a green Timmy player I will proceed to his at you for suggesting to take away my lands, as is expected from our kind. It's funny though, I've never hated blue for counter spells. I'm kinda sad I usually don't get to be the D.A.D
Land removal exists to deal with green, but the Commander Social Contract on average dictates no one can zap or wipe anyone’s lands. I play red. I am going to run land removal for that reason.
The reason why I dislike blue and white's cheats is they target other people's things. Red black and green are just in their own little world having fun lol
Green by itself is fine. Until you start mixing and matching it with other colors! Green + Blue -> Draw all the cards and counter all the spells! Green + Black -> reanimate all the creatures, destroy all the things, sacrifice value as much as you want! Green + red -> Green + white -> infinite tokens swarming the board and buffing them to be gigantic!
Black is just the best at tutoring any card it needs while the other colors are good at tutoring specific types of cards, like green for lands or blue for instants and sorceries. Its part of what makes each color unique and how they generally function within the color pie and game
That ending statement fits my prosper deck to a T. If people recognize me and see my prosper, their usual goal is to make sure as soon as prospers out he dies before I get too much value. The problem for them in that case is by the third or 4th after his first cast I usually have enough of my pieces that will chain together well even without him and allow me to replay him, and then benefit more. It’s a horrible cycle that I apologize for almost every game because yes it’s bullshit, but it’s probably the most fun I’ve had in a card game since pre pendulum in yugioh when I was a innocent casual, before I was chased out by non stop negate floods and hand traps and found sanctuary in commander.
Green starts with a sprinkler and becomes a waterfall, you saw it coming. Every other color gets to play with the fire hose at random intervals of time to make other people sad.
I can confirm green players are, in fact, the "bourgeoisie" (english majors I swear to god) and do get coddled a lot. I know because I am one by heart.
Honestly green sort of does everything in magic these days. They make tokens just as good as white, draw cards just as good as blue, damage as much as red and for some reason green managed to figure out that graveyards exist. They may not do that as good as black does... yet, unless its mana from the grave then the graveyard is just another hand to play lands from. Honestly I don't think green gets the pass as much anymore. But if it did, the reason it does is that while the green player is hiding in the corner beneath a mountain of dudes that work out too much and the entire damn Yellowstone national park, the only real way green interacts is with your face. White the rest of the colors interact with your plays green only interacts with your life total.
I will say, my personal issues with Green come from a player at my LGS, whose decks have a tendency to finish games not with creatures, enchantments, artifacts, instants, or sorceries, but with lands. The most brutal deck I remember him playing was Titania, Protector of Argoth. With multiple lands to bounce/kill his commander, and a constantly resetting Glacial Chasm, repeated card draw from Cryptic Caves, and good old Field of the Dead, nothing the table tried mattered. Counter his commander? He has enough lands to play her 3 more times that turn. Blow up his lands? He replays Titania and gets them back. Exile his graveyard? He discards Kozilek, Butcher of Truth or Ulamogg, the Infinite Gyre to shuffle it away, then search his lands again with Elvish Reclaimer.
It’s really simple why everyone is chill with green. Because them getting the bigger, cooler board state doesn’t prevent others from doing the same, or single out other players as targets for harsh effects.
"The White players are in a similar boat. The way they get to cheat hardest at Magic is to impose additional arbitrary rules that are either unfairly oppressive to the other players or unfairly helpful to them. It's just like real life." Okay but I gotta ask for cards that require a vote or headcount does that mean the Black players only count as 3/5ths?
3/5ths? Coming from the color that routinely reanimate the dead and force them to do their bidding and openly work with demons? I suspect that the skeletons, zombies, and other such like thrulls forced into servitude would be none too happy that their masters are attempting to claim that they're the wronged party in this arrangement.
The reason green gets away with it is cause for 10ish years it was the weakest mono color tied with white. Green couldn't open a door without someone running its fade. it was also the weakest color in pairs and triples. Then after first kamigawa block green started getting much better. Then better still, till now it just might be the strongest single color in t 4:10 he game.
I personally have a weird attitude on green in commander, anytime I’m in a low power pod green cards feel broken but in higher power green cards are hardly played. It is weird how all the green effects are just but when you can’t capitalize on it does it even matter?
Funnily enough, green is able to even emulate the other colors cheats: - removal? Got it (weaker towards creatures, but the green player generally kill you before it matters) - card draw? Got that in spades - tutors? Geared towards creatures, but the green creature pool is so cracked that this limitation doesn’t matter Hell, they even have a bootleg Propaganda in Elephant grass.
Black (and white to a lesser extent) also have the graveyard cheat (drop the biggest thing, reanimate is one mana), but graveyard hate is the only hate we're told to consistently bring to the table just in case
as someone who just made a green/black commander deck based around generating massive numbers of squirrels for ridiculously low cost and then sacrificing all my free squirrels to do whatever I want, ...yeah.
Probably because with green, it’s all literally on the table. You know exactly how they got to this point and watched it happen, which also makes it pretty easy to trip up or take advantage of.
Green doesn't stop you from doing your turn, just makes funny big bois and go face Blue on the other hand, likes to poop on your freshly washed car with a lot of evil things
If I had to guess, the reason green gets less attention when it comes to their bonkers value generation is that while their color’s method of “cheating” mainly affects their own side of the board, the other four colors “cheat” in ways that do more to interfere with the game plans of other players (not R as much as WUB but their speed is still something). It’s a lot easier to get pissed off at the jerk across the table who just void rended your commander than the green player next to them who can’t even see your commander over their pile of creatures and lands.
except when the green player makes his big shit fight on ETB and george foreman but leafy claps your entire board
@@lord_wyran Yes, but that attack ends the game. It's what OP and Mald was getting at, you don't notice the Green player until it's too late.
Okay but in a game of interaction complaining that people are touching your stuff is a whiner baby statement that should not be respected.
This and the whole video really explains why I play RG. I just like having a bunch of shit on my board. I play the "more" game.
That’s personally exactly why I like playing green. It’s very self contained. I will not interact with you, *I AM* the threat to be interacted with. I much prefer being the early threat then being the guy who has to say no to the early threat
Red also gets damage cheating however, in the form of tripling, doubling, or otherwise jacking up the damage dealt via any source.
City on fire is one of my favorite cards
@@Skyeshadow3408Goblin card through and through
Which, if you think about it, Is both ramp and card advantage.
Yeah, but like Maldhound is saying, compare the reactions to playing Torbran and playing Harrow. Torbran gets nuked immediately, Harrow gets an appreciative nod. While in actual gameplay effect, Torbran only helps red cope a little better with 40 vs. 20 life nerf a lot of their cards receive, where Harrow means I'm throwing down a creature bigger than their whole deck while my opponents are just getting started. (Harrow is so fucking good)
Also red was pretty good at resource denial in ye olden days of magic i.e. Blood Moon or Smoke.
Play those and watch the hate you get. I run them both in my Norin's Prison deck and man do people get salty.
i once saw a guy talk about how the thing commander players value the most is feeling like they are 'getting to play' or 'do the thing'. they wanna draw cards, cast spells, combo off or see the synergies in their deck in play and if they don't win thats ok but if you stop them from ever doing the thing or make it so they don't get to draw cards or have a cool turn that's when they get pissy. green will slam you like a monster but it doesn't directly stop you from doing the thing, which the other colors in excess all tend to do, i think thats why it gets forgiven.
I wasn't looking for ur comment, but I'm glad I found it, and going off of my post-gane sentiments, I 100% agree.
I only recently got into commander, but iirc I've been my most salty when I had a game where I felt I "didn't get to do anything" or didn't get my engine online. (Or directly targeted due to base power of my deck compared to the res tof the room/someone dropping a piece of repeatable hate and saying it's specifically for me.)
Me as a primarily Green player clicking on this immediately:
Time to get roasted by my favorite MtG youtuber
We are hearty, we can take it
same
@@PsychoDiesel48 this is true recently I was playing a month local of mana deck and basically made a blue player feel useless because I went to cast Early harvest to un tapp all basic lands after playing a mass land search and it got counted then played a bear umbra attacked then untapped all my lands any way . Then proceeded to play vorinclex (the mean mana one ) and retry wilderness reclamation to untap my land again . Next turn someone plays a board wipe and I heroic intervention green truly is resilient
I'm here for the two colour roast because my fav colour combo is Simic. Despite his blue love, he hates Simic most of the guilds.
...
And I get it because we are disgustingly good at "cheating".
Same
Green gets by because most people are on the boat of “but it’s fun making big things go sideways”. My guy, it’s magic, almost all of us are trying to make big things go sideways.
I’m here to cast 40 spells in a turn. I don’t care what size thing gets turned sideways.
The way I look at it, if you're willing to look me in my eyes from across the table and proceed to piece together a convoluted haste combo of craterhoof and a billion tokens that cost you 21 mana and some life and tell me that that's the best you could come up with, I'm willing to let you. And then I'll cast cyclonic rift and nothing happened at all for the 10 minutes it took to assemble that combo, according to the boardstate at eot.
to be fair the big thing that blue wants to turn sideways is the 100 card deck, hell depending on the deck they want all 400
Tell that to the izzet players.
Green players will get mad at you for having a 1/1 with deathtouch
I’d argue that Black’s way of cheating is more that of all the colors, they have the most ways use non-standard resources to pay for stuff, combined with an ability to use their graveyard in ways that other colors mostly can’t.
Often, their cards are way cheaper and/or more powerful than normal, but they come with a cost or drawback (a lot of Demon creatures, for example, or things like Phyrexian Negator). Other times, they just pay with life instead of mana. And of course, they get to use their graveyard as a resource in addition to their hand and library.
To continue the analogy of real money that Mald uses, green pays for their shit by being rich (ramp spells) and exploiting the labor of their underlings (mana dorks), while black doesn’t necessarily have much money, but when it comes time to pay, black either flashes some cleavage and goes “surely there must be some other way to pay”, or they go dumpster diving (graveyard stuff), or they start selling organs on the black market.
I would argue that White does an equal if not occasionally better job of using their graveyard. Black/White is the ressurection colors, but Black is all about ritualistic sacrifice, while white costs more, but ultimately doesn't particularly try to nickel and dime you otherwise. It is a balance: Doomed Necromancer is sacrificed to bring back my Sun Titan, who enters the battlefield bringing back my Doomed Necromancer. It is like Jesus, you only need to kill him a little bit, just keep him under a rock for a few days kinda thing.
That’s a fantastic analogy!
Meanwhile Red is like, mana? Heck I got that. Oh and btw?! Fuck that land of yours....oops
Personally I see black as being able to do almost all the things that every other color can do.
Black can draw, board control, go wide buff, drop fatties, ramp, combat tricks, evasion, the list goes on and on. Everything that is a staple in other colors (and is their 'thing') black can do, just not as well in isolation. Where black _really_ shines is when it's paired with another color to both buff it's strengths and shore up it's weaknesses.
My guess is that green gets more of a pass since it is more focused on building itself instead of messing with everyone else and that green mainly wins by hitting face, which is inefficient at winning in commander (hence why cEDH is combo focused)
I recently did a BG booster game with friends and made a green blue deck. No one bated an eye at my scary monsters or having 8 mana turn 3, but one counterspell and everyone lost their mind lol. This man speaks the truth
Why did I read this comment in the voice of Heath Ledger’s Joker
@@Sassacracklepop cause it feels like how he'd play magic
Green also doesn't play many alternate win conditions or much interaction, Green's removal is mostly based on enchantment/artifact/flying hate and it's only way to deal with creatures on the other side of the table is to have creatures themselves. Green does have access to infect; one of it's few alternate win conditions but all of the colors have access to poison counters at this point and it shares that mostly with Black. Green's at it's scariest when it's strengths get to be mixed with the other colours' tool boxes.
Green has highly efficient artifact and enchantment removal, a nonzero amount of targeted land hate, creature removal in every set, and more spells that are particularly excellent at disabling commanders than anything but blue. Green probably has the best overall interactive suite of any color except white.
Yeah, when I read 'Green doesnt have interaction',@@Kestral287, I almost spit up my drink. They have THE MOST COMBAT TRICKS in the game and they've been consistently given all the tools they traditionally didn't have--card draw, creature removal, even fucking COUNTERSPELLS.
Green has the best removal in the game, player removal
@@varsoonhks3211What instant speed creature removal do they have that isn't using creatures? Asking because I'm building a mono green deck and I might as well use this heated argument as tips
You're going to need a creature for all bite and fight effects--even just something as simple as those one green cost deathtouchers are worth running if that's the route you take,@@dom6637. When I am talking about Green kill spells, that's more of what I mean; Green decks will usually have creatures, being able to just say "Well now I can do targeted kill spells too" on top of that feels a bit cruel.
Otherwise (and this will be mostly flying hate, or to deal with Enchantment Creatures or Artifact Creatures)--Aerial Predation, Aerial Volley, Beast Within, Broken Wings, Choose Your Weapon, Crash Landing, Crushing Canopy, Crushing Vines, Eaten by Spiders, Fell the Pheasant, Forced Landing, Gloomwidow's Feast, Leaf Arrow, Mistakes Were Made, Pierce the Sky, Pistus Spike, Plummet, Return to the Earth, Ruinous Intrusion, Run Afoul, Siggatars' Volley, Shower of Arrows, Shredding Winds, Slingbow Trap, Sundering Vitae, Tangletrap, Thornado, Ettercap's adventure, Green Slime.
Most popular of these is, of course, Beast Within, which sees play in a ton of Green decks.
I almost died when you flashed Zada on screen, I legit have had her pop off with Storm Kiln Artist once and said “woah I gotta let this one cool off for a while” and proceeded to not play that deck for months so people at the LGS will actually play with me.
Newer to the game and I gotta know….
@@MrClearlink so Zada pops off with the lint in your pocket, a paper clip, and two goblins. Her ability makes it so the millions of terrible spells in red suddenly become incredible spells. Things like “target creature can’t block, draw a card”. Now you’re drawing for each creature you have on the field. You can make a Zada deck that demolishes tables for like $20. Red was a crime and god simply hasn’t caught on yet.
I got accused of war crimes the last time my Zada deck popped off. I went from 5 mana and like 10 creatures to 130 treasures (we stopped counting) and 30+ creatures on turn 5.
Man...I miss my Zada deck. I'd be like "Guys, look at my cute little goblins, oh I drew a cantrip...so you know what that means: ya die and I draw 60 cards"
As a predominantly green player thank you, I feel seen.
That said, I deserve it. Between black killing the cool stuff, white and red killing everything, and blue just saying no: my shit only goes off if the fun police distract each other long enough (that they don't kill my 29 power champion of lamholdt, that I kept talking about and put at the front of my board so they wouldn't forget)
Champion is a kill on sight card. Skill issue on their part.
As a green player myself, I think it's because our strategy tends to be more solitaire, building up something that then breaks into your side of the board, as opposed to other colours that are more suited for interaction; If you're against Green, your own board state is safer from their cheating.
When blue, black, or white try to play solitaire, they're derided for "not trying to play the game". When green and red play solitaire, calling them out is met with the response "play more creatures then".
Mono U Artifact ramp: “YOU ARE A TRY HARD USING FAST MANA ARTIFACYS! MOXES AND MANA CRYPT ARE BUSTED!”
@@NecroAsphyxia ....Yes?
And then there's me, a devout lover of all things Colorless. My Karn, Legacy Reforged deck is so much fun, people are confused the first time they see it but once I get my own mana base going, get some key artifacts out, and start getting things fast, it's honestly quite formidable. And of course I'm also in the process of working on an Eldrazi tribal deck as well.
Guess I must've been scarred by Mirrodin, because as soon as I see someone busting out the colorless I know that they're enemy number 1.
Green gets away with it because it's typically the easiest to deal with out of other colors cheating in my opinion.
I've found it's easier to blow up/exile Green's creatures and destroy their doublers than it is to:
Proactively play around White's hatebears and tax effects
Outmaneuver Blue's counterspells and tap effects
Successfully stop every single one of Black's tutors (or ultimately stop what they tutored for)
Predict when Red goes from being kinda cute and quirky to being the actual game ending threat
But the biggest part of the problem is the ramp, and green is the only color that gets land ramp, which because land destruction is soft banned in commander can’t really be dealt with
@declanmadden6058 I mean...reds all about that land destruction but nobody wants to have that on their table.
Land destruction is a VIABLE way to control green. But everyone gets salty when you bring it out.
@@declanmadden6058 As a green player I agree that our ramp is your problem however this issue is solvable when you think about it yes we ramp fast but can we still keep up when we don't have powerful card draw, tutoring, cheating mana and damage, and quantity of creatures and hatebears. the only thing makes green powerful is other color combinations hence why a green player somehow hates to go mono-green because they also want your toys. don't hate the mono-green hate the one who uses SIMIC.
@@Circu_ch "We don't have card draw" sure, okay, Beanstalk totally doesn't exist, Collected Company doesn't cheat up bodies, y'all have plenty of shit to go hard with you just pretend its not real or not good, you guys get the best or second best quantity and quality of bodies in most situations
@@Circu_ch casually lies so you can continue to bamboozle the new magic players into the "Green is okay" cult. Return of the Wildspeaker, Rishkar's expertise, Shamanic Revelation, Beast Whisperer, Tribute to the world(speaker? might be tree) off the top of my head draws extraordinarily well, you can tutor creatures and lands including non basics (GAEAS CRADLE), Vigor for damage and tons of cards to make creatures cost less, and multiple token doubling effects. Green real weakness is creature removal AND THEIR CREATURES ARE STRONGER ANYWAYS. Don't just hate the green players burn down their forest and murder their dinos
As a dirty rotten green (but mostly Gruul) player, this is some of the highest praise I have ever heard. Thank you.
I think part of why green gets away with it and something like blue doesn't is based off of a lot of people playing low power or bad decks. A bad green deck ramps a little and just plays some okay creatures every turn till they empty their hand. A bad blue deck puts up a fog bank and counters everything remotely threatening with literally no game plan to actually win or while hoping to find that singular card in the 99 that does something. Just based off my experiences though, yours might differ.
the reason green gets away with it is because green isn't taking actions away from other people. green actively incentivizes players to be proactive about dealing with it because the longer you don't, the bigger the problem becomes until you can't deal with it anymore.
conversely, the reason blue gets so much hate (sometimes undeserved but only sometimes) is because blue takes actions away from people which often feels more unfair even if it actually might not be, incentivizing players to be more passive and reactive which has a tendency to create a game state centered around noninteraction until someone decides they have enough shit to burn through however many "nopes" they think the blue player has in their hand
and additionally this is also why simic is the most hated of all because it forces you to do both at the same time with seemingly very little meaningful trade off either way
getting your action stuffed by gaea's blessing doesn't feel as bad as when your opponent casts negate on you even if the net result for both situations ends up being functionally the same.
when a green player has untapped mana on your turn, you're wondering what he's planning. when a blue player has untapped mana on your turn, you're rolling your eyes because you know exactly what's coming
And we live for that eye roll. Nothing better in the world.
Green isn't taking actions away? Lol, say hello to mirriad of Fog effects or wide array of artifact removal or cards that shutdown opponent attempts to kill Greens creatures via giving them hexproof and/or indestructable with upsides like DRAWING CARDS FOR EACH CREATURE with a +1/+1 counter on it or my personal "favourite" card - Questing Beast. Oh you are playing a token deck? Or relying on fog effects to survive? Or you thinking that Teferi's Protection will save you? Cute.
@@InquisitorSinCross iirc Teferi's Protection actually works, since it doesn't nullify damage, it just says your Life can't change, which is a completely different thing from preventing damage
Still pops all those turbofog effects
@@syrelian depends. If Questing Beast is your commander or you cast Triumph of the Hordes, then Teferi's Protection won't work, because of how rules work: commander damage and poison counters don't care if your opponent's life total changed
@@InquisitorSinCross This is very true, you still take the damage, its just unable to change that number
It's painful how true this is. "They will never talk about how the green player is put forth as the Timmy, the everyman, when they are in fact the bourgeois. They are taking the same game actions and getting paid double." BARS!
Jokes on green aside I think this brings up an interesting point about the social dynamics of the color pie in Commander. Green is often considered the big mana lol timmy style deck and as such has been given a lot of extra tools over time to where its now widely considered to be the top dog in the format. Yet we still treat it like the lol timmy color thats just trying to have fun.
To be faaaaair if you go high enough on the power scale (cedh) green arguably becomes the worst color in the game. So I don't know about "top dog", but I respect the sentiment.
Green landfall is not competitive? I admit it's pretty kick ass in my pod
@@Duransurik when you play no holds barred, its simply too slow. Having to have multiple pieces that can generate landfall triggers and take advantage of them is worse than just draw half your deck and win the game with loads of fast mana and free counter spells, on turn 3. Green does have good cards, but as a whole, when they dont have time to set up, the colour gets a lot worse.
In cedh green is a combo color because it's too weak for anything else due its bad value engine
@@stylesheetra9411 CEDH is kind of its own thing. I still see green played in CEDH. Its never on its own but its certainly a part of the format. Out side of CEDH though Green is very omnipresent. Which is what a majority of the Commander players actually play.
Honestly, I feel like Blue's cheating isn't denial, it's their massive card draw. Green gets more mana and such while blue gets more cards in hand. And people don't really complain about card draw (at least not that much). Denial is just a thing that they can do.
Yes but he's a blue main. First rule of excessive card draw, we don't talk about our excessive card draw.
I think part of it is that it's really weird in a game about spellcasters that only 1 colour gets general counter magic ( I guess black very rarely does with a cost too but cheating with a cost was Black's thing in early Magic )
Card Draw feels way more like an appropriate cheat.
Is blue actually better at drawing cards though?
Black gets better card draw than blue. It costs life, but Night's Whisper is better than Divination. And Green gets better draw too. It interacts in some way with their creatures, but Rishkar's Expertise is better than Opportunity.
Blue's biggest failing is that it hasn't been able to show people how bad its card draw actually is.
@@Kestral287 There might be individual examples with better draw in either of those, but blue's the one that has some form of card draw on every third card, and then gets to do stuff because of that draw as well.
@@Kestral287Between their widespread access to Scrying, as well as the sheer number of blue cards that allow you to draw cards, Blue is arguably better on average at drawing cards than any other color, even if a well-constructed black deck that builds around it can potentially match or even exceed your average blue deck. Furthermore, Blue has by far the most synergies with card draw; they have creatures that scale in power with the size of your hand, ways of turning decking out into a win-con like Thassa’s Oracle, ways of making their own card draw boosts their creatures, or force their opponent to mill, or manipulating the top of their deck with things like Fact or Fiction.
I think it's because green keeps to itself while doing it's thing. Honestly blue and white are the main colours I see hate for. Black and red are considered chill and in the same boat as green in my play spaces.
Green is just the Chad going, 'Hey, can your Stompies beat my Stompies?'
My mono green commander deck with Vorinclex and insane mana ramp doesn't allow me to cheat my cards out.... hides the Monster Manual, Dramatic Entrance, Quicksilver Amulet, Planar Bridge, Elvish Piper out of sight along with Mana Reflection, Nyxbloom Ancient.
As someone who made Zada when she first came out I feel this. I won my first game. Every subsequent game I was basically shut out with Iona.
From your explanation it seems like the key to Green being forgiven is because it's method of cheating doesn't directly interfere with your own cheating. You leave Green Bay it's devices and 4 turns in its got an army or a Colossus on it's side. But during those 4 turns the opponent is still able to build their own side or attempt to decimate Green before they're too big
Well, when your main way to interact with other players' board state is to send big, stompy dinosaurs to smash their stuff into puddles of goo, you get a bit more of a pass than the people either making your stuff just disappear or the people that keep you from doing stuff in the first place.
the thing i always keep coming back to is "green gets to do everything." drives me nuts
Green gets to do pretty much everything. Simic gets to do E V E R Y T H I N G.
@@thorncodyand Sultai might as well be called WOTC because they basically get to make the damn rules.
go wide, go tall, insane draw, and they kinda have countermagic in their protection spells - veil of fucking summer anyone? and on top of this yeah being the mana colour is too imbalanced
@@rrrrrrrachelThey do suck at having a card to stop other's stuff They have bad creature removal and can cant too much if it's not their turn>
@@rrrrrrrachelweird how cEDH is dominated by lists playing every color except green, the best decks in modern/legacy/vintage don't play green at all.
I feel like part of the "cheating" not feeling as bad is due to green mostly focusing on itself and that player. {Heck, I've gone back in writing to add this before posting the comment to say that honestly what can be said for green can be said for black and red in this video. The only two unfun colors are blue and white, the other two "cheats" don't seem that bad, and I've never experienced the complaints for the other colors that way} Sure, there are removal spells in green, but they don't tend to be as good as non-green counterparts. Green is ramping themselves so they can play, but as you've pointed out with the other colors:
Blue - countering someone else's play, preventing them from doing anything. Otherwise bouncing or forever tapping, yet again completely denying someone's ability to play their cool stuff.
White - removal and stax, your first example is "lands don't untap, only untap one in upkeep" which completely prevents people from playing the game as a whole. I don't see as much complaining with white when it comes to things like Gandalf despite their value. Everything else that enforces rules are stax pieces, and people don't like stax except for the stax player. Isn't it fun only being able to cast one spell each turn? Costing more hurts everybody but the green player, and even still a green ramp player probably wants their mana efficiently used, so once again: stax no like. The "fun hater" isn't unwarranted, you *are* preventing or slowing down the game to a grinding halt. That's not to say all games need to be fast or cEDH, by no means, but we're all trying to sit down and play a fun game, not mindless boring torture as you're waiting for t18 to cast a card you'd otherwise be able to play on t6.
Black - Eh, this one's basically just green's benefit but streamlined. It does make the game more linear, but that's not a problem unless you make it a problem, and even still a lot of decks want to focus on one or two strategies anyway so this is just speeding it up. The things I see that black also has is a lot of reanimate/grave spells, which I think was a missed point here. I feel like the same arguments made for black fall well in line with green, it's just self focused in *this* case, but black also has a lot of murder/removal, discarding, regen, evasion, sacrifice, life loss/drain, I feel like the cheat here was the wrong focus.
Red - Their cheat is Krenko and nothing more. Or, oof, ouchie, my ping damage! Wait, it was doubled? TRIPLED?! AND DOUBLED AGAIN?! I dunno, I think this was another missed opportunity for the complaint department, the ephemeral take is basically in line with black which means it's basically in line with green.
When you're focused on advancing your board and plays it's fine, but when you're focused on stopping other people's board and play that's not fun. I think it's important that people encounter these issues so they can build better decks, but at the end of the day it's just not fun to be on the receiving end of "I know we all agreed to play, but I'm going to specifically prevent you from playing until I win by attrition."
All that is to say, blue and white feel justified in their cheating complaints, but black and red don't feel as bad. Jund players win, I guess.
I will put forward that I want to play with your group, because I have been targeted due to a single Rampant Growth while the Blue player has an enchantment that lets them draw six cards a turn.
An even greater crime than the existence of such a blue card is the fact that this egregious nonsense doesn't even tell me *which* of those cards you're referring to
Lord knows there's all too many, those greedy bastards 😔(not that other colors aren't, green being *especially* greedy)
As someone who has played Green for pretty much the entirety of Commander's history, the main problem now (it started more like 6-7 years ago) is that the quality of the cards you're able to play is ridiculously higher than it used to be and there are a lot better options for playing 3+ colors. When every set has 50+ busted Legendary Mythics, you're drowning in options.
Used to be that you sacrificed consistency for access to more tools, and there were way fewer efficient mana rocks or mana doublers, and a lot of them were either for Red or were Symetrical (Gauntlet of Power, Heartbeat of Spring, etc).
Nowadays you rarely see a GREEN deck, it's just being used to finance all of the other busted shit in the 4 and 5 color decks. So if you're opting to not play Green, then you're kneecapping yourself from the start. It *shouldn't* be like that, but it's still the general rule.
Damn. I was not expecting this serious a video. Damn good though. Very well spoken.
Green is the most unfair color in the game, especially when it pairs with blue to form the filthy simic.
Green gets to play an extra land and blue gets to not make you have a turn and also take an extra turn
Me: Plays Grixis
The 5 other players at the table; turn one: "House Rule, we all only attack the Grixis player."
As a primarily blue player (dunno why it's what I'm known for at my lgs), I find a lot of people get way more mad at a counter spell than they do at ramp or doubling up on stuff. I've watched it from my own games, people reacted more explosively (positive and negative) to my counter spells than they did to my Bright-Palm shenanigans. You'd think a suddenly 11 commander damage swing out of nowhere is much more noteworthy than a single counter spell but I've been made the threat more for the latter.
That said, I like that each color has a specific way to cheat at the game. It makes things more interesting especially when the colors are mixed together. Mind you, rainbow decks are all either jank or every possible way to cheat all at once
I've never understood the hate someone gives over a counter spell. Like it's called interaction!!! What did you expect me to just sit here and let you play solitaire?
Iirc, there was a time when green's options were "little guy that produced more mana", "combat trick", "enchantment to make a guy trampler/hit harder", and "Expensive 4/4s, or higher". Over time they started eating White's token and counter duplication and rule cheating, black's restorations (sortof, through regeneration) and tutors, some of red's keywords like haste and direct damage (through fighting), and blue's keywords like hexproof or flying. Usually with the excuse that "yeah, nature does that". Because nature does everything if you look hard enough.
Also green gets away with the mana thing because its meaningless until its *used* for something. Its like stockpiling guys with white. You can have 1000 1/1s and people will be like "holy shit we should do something about that" but unless you attack with them nobody's really going to care probably. And because of all the times green's had all the mana and jack to do with it people forgive it.
As a green player to me the main weakness of the color is that it can be rather fragile albeit scary, as green tends to run very creature-centric strategies, and there are infinitely more ways to deal with creatures than with other card types such as enchantments and instants/sorceries. That being said, the value engines in green are still absolutely ridiculous and I like and agree with the perspective of "every color cheats differently"
The counterpoint to that is, green is literally the color that deals with those non-creatures better than any other color. Nobody else kills artifacts and enchantments as easily as green. Nobody else kills creatures as easily as green. Nobody else kills planeswalkers as easily as green.
@@dontmisunderstand6041 Black and white have better creature removal by a wide margin. hell in 60 card 1v1 red and blue do better because they unlike green in 99% of creatures don't need a board to deal with yours. planeswalkers as best dealt with by red as haste creatures mean you can start punching them faster than other colors and blue and white have a lot of fliers. Green's thing is it has the best creatures for the lowest cost really good ways to interact with noncreature permanents and is decent at everything else but that can feel insane if they're set up. However, that applies to pretty much every color as they can all accomplish nuts things with setup. Green is just disliked in mid power because it's the best at enabling bullshit in ways your opponents don't interact with. once lands are in play most people don't run much if any ways to interact with them
@@jmanwild87 Most green creature removal costs 1 mana. For more than that you get extra on top of the removal.
If green doesn't have creatures on board, it means they haven't had a turn since the last board wipe was cast. Having a board presence isn't something to worry about when considering the quality of removal, because no amount of removal will prevent you from losing if you don't have anything yourself.
@dontmisunderstand6041 Most green creature removal also requires you to have a creature that is as big or bigger than what you're trying to out whether it be a fight or bite spell Which in commander is more difficult than it sounds and leaves you very open for 2 for 1s.
@@jmanwild87 Multiplayer is an entirely different format where you'd be stupid to play ANY 1 for 1 removal, because it puts you down a card against everybody you didn't just piss off. A 3 for 1 is the bare minimum removal needs to be to be worth playing AT ALL in a 4 player format. And even then, you're still down on mana to break even in card advantage with a 3 for 1.
Like I already said, you have a board presence, or removal already doesn't matter in the first place. So requiring a board presence to cast your removal isn't a big deal.
I keep saying it, green is the favorite child of magic the gathering. Look at gaea's cradle compared to my pitiful red shivan's gorge.
exactly what a card advantage addict would say.
I don’t know what you are talking about but I saw cards where are the cards and can I draw them?
I honestly think that there are other instances where red gets hated. It's usually because of one of three things:
1) it's unpredictable and explosive, and usually wins come out of nowhere. Like I dumped my hand in one turn and banfire you for 46, or I just made infinite goblin tokens with haste from a couple cards that weren't even in my hand last turn.
2) it's usually too random. Things get exhiled and replaced by random stuff, which usually throws everything off (Chaos Warp, Thibalt's trickery, etc)
3) Land destruction. It shares this trait with white but red's land destruction is more consistent and usually more punishing (Obliterate, Jokulhaups)
The real issue is that the counterplay to green is to use mass land destruction to destroy the absurd advantage they generate, but that counterplay is banned from most tables not playing cEDH.
Ngl the "in this essay I..." bit will get a cheap laugh out of me 10/10 times 😂
As a green player with a friend who absolutely hates green, this is all accurate
I imagine Green gets to get away with it for a lot od the playerbase between focusing on creatures that in theory are easy to interact with and having been arguably the overall weakest color for the majority of the game's life given how weak creatures *used* to be. A lot of people also just like "battlecruiser" _Magic_ (as long as they're not losing to it).
How Green keeps getting away with it with WotC, on the hand, is the more mystifying thing even as easy that would be to blame solely on WotC under Hasbro only caring about money, game balance be damned. I still don't under why the anti-artifact color somehow has the most Treasure (and to a degree Food and Clue) creation now, but whatever.
Ah, I love the simple little card Rabbit Battery. A 1 drop with haste that can be attached to another creature to give it it's stats including haste, almost like a "pay 1 extra mana for your creature to give it haste" it's so reliable
I adore most of the reconfigured cards. I think they are better than living weapon a lot of the time in my equipment decks.
Well, there is one color that is better at mana generation than green :
Colorless.
Sol Ring, Mana Fault, Lotus Petal, Jeweled Lotus, Relic of Sauron, Arcane signet, and so on...
Kinda sad that a color that is not even a color gets to do green better than green.
So one of my current EDH decks I have right now is a mono-green deck where all the cards in the deck aside from basic snow forests specifically mentions +1/+1 counters in the card text. So it doesn't use Kaldheim Vorinclex or Doubling Season or anything that talks about being Modified, just cards that care about specifically +1/+1 counters. Since there are so many Hardened Scales effects in green, it can get silly if you just don't interact with me at all...but since green has very little ways to protect its own stuff as it is, and with my deck conditions removing most of those options, it's very easy to put me out of the game super early with just one or two removal spells, heaven forbid a board wipe.
This is the first of the REAL two reasons Green as a solo color gets excused for it's version of cheating: it almost ALWAYS wins via combat damage of big chonky creatures, yet has very few ways to protect them without splashing in another color. Hexproof and Indestructible are merely secondary evergreen keywords when it comes to Green, but even with Archetype of Endurance/Asceticism or similar effects and maybe an Eldrazi Monument, what is Green's answer to mass exile? What is greens answer to single or mass sacrifice? Tajuru Preserver is about it, and for more options you need to splash into White usually, but that doesn't even take into account that Green doesn't have much of an answer to even just single target removal most times...and when White, Blue and Black and pay 1-2 mana to deal with your creature easily and your creatures that are actually a huge threat cost upwards of 6 mana, maybe it's a good thing Green ramps the best.
The second and arguably bigger reason that Green is excused of their flavor of cheating is that Green has very little interaction with the other colors and has little to no removal. Green shines a bit when it comes to removing artifacts and enchantments, sure, but creatures and spells on the stack? Outside of Beast Within and Ezuri's Predation, your creatures are gonna stay unless they have a big creature and some sort of fight effect...and the spells are just gonna resolve as they are.
Its cause with green we get to watch it happen. Red we blink and lose, blue we blink and nothing has changed. Black is being a magician and pulling cards out of their deck by naming them and white says that card you have in your hand is staying there for a bit. Green is just Boom a man dork, boom a combo piece, boom another combo piece, boom a monstrosity now deal with it.
And that monstrosity can often be killed by a two cost card.
The monstrosities pulled out by the other cards though? Fuck me.
blue I can get up and make a sandwich and they are still on their turn...
Basically this is "commander players complaining about air again".
I think what most people hate the other colors but forgive green for is that other colors, blue especially, cheat by not letting you play the game. Which is alot more annoying than someone just getting mana quickly, like yeah you'll still lose but at least you're allowed to play a card without that guy going "I have a response" again and again
Shigeki and his fog effects are sending their regards. "Oh, you want to finish the game with damage? Tough luck - I have a response: fog. Oh it was in my graveyard? No problem, I'll just recur it, so I'll never run out of responses. Oh and btw, all you did in this game was meaningless, because I've ramped so hard, that I'm gonna win with Helix Pinnacle".
In Commander specifically, the way green cheats is much more impactful than in the 2-player, 60-card formats that most of their cheatiest cards were designed for, WHILE ALSO being viewed as more thematically appropriate for the format. Because Commander is supposed to be the format where you get to play your big stupid stuff that's too slow or too inconsistent for regular competitive formats.
This is your daily reminder to jam Confounding Conundrum into every deck with blue. It doesn't deny landfall triggers and it doesn't blow up lands. It merely prevents the green X landfall deck from triggering their 2,000,000 landfalls AND ramping as a side effect. If your deck dies to confounding conundrum, you failed during deckbuilding. Its a card that lets you deny people ramp without being accused of MLD (though I've still experienced a lot of salt for playing it)
Watching someone play this against my landfall deck and just keking as retreat to coralhelm wins me the game
Yep. Playing against green makes me feel like I need to play land hate. In my casual commander decks
I mean, most cards have their managen system. Greens is just more permanent.
Black: Mana advantage through ritualistic sacrifice.
White: Mana advantage through graveyard bullshit but with less life cost and more mana cost. (I run Sefris, which is what you call "Graveyard Legos." and I would agree, because my Cataclysmic Gearhulk makes it so that at the end of it I take a bowling ball and drop it on the Millenium Falcon I just spent the last hour building in exchange for dropping the same bowling ball on everyone else's Millenium Falcons too. The thing is I have the Master Builder cheat on, so while everyone else is piecing together it at a regular speed I am building like a commercial. The number of times I have used a Doomed Necromancer to bring back Sun Titan who enters the battlefield bringing back doomed necromancer is too goddamn often)
Blue: Pay your cheating in installments with Fortell. You can bring out 8 mana cost cards turn 6. Arguably the weakest of the managen, but it is managen. in its own right
Colorless: Colorless is like if green wanted to be androids rather than furries. Their manadorks are just not capable of defense and are capable to go into anybody's deck. They also get free shit like it is Vantablack Friday.
Green's thing is around land gen. How often do they get a card that gives discounts to other cards? Or get to bring back creatures for free? They may be grinding through their deck to pay all the costs they can, but of all the colors they actually do pay sticker price.
You are absolutely right though that Green has a tendency to fly under the radar against the edgelords and the blue wizards and the fireballs.
I won't stand for this green slander, I'll take my 30 mana and walk away.
This is why Sultai is my favorite color combination in Commander. I get more resources to spend, the things I spend them on are exactly the things that I want at the moment, and I get to decide if the others at the table get to do the things they want. It’s a great way to be relevant for the entirety of a long four person game
While you are correct, every color cheats at least a little.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the only colors that don't stick their fingers in other people's business all the time in commander is green and red, which for a lot of players makes them "the most fair" colors in commander.
Sorry about this long take in advance, but my love for this game has roused it out of me.
When your argument is based around [fair = all the time], be sure to check how much time you have been given.
Red and green seem fair in Commander because the format innately changes the equation to discourage aggression by a factor of 6.
The format favours combo, but passively discourages it, because the more time it takes to explain the steps the less agency people feel. The game already has a time dilation of a factor of 2, and when you add in bureaucracy that factor painfully inflates.
And then we get to white. If there are four white players in a game of commander there's a [fair] chance everyone is standing around letting the angels fly around unabated until the inevitable nuke is dropped and all the taxes left in the world are gathered by the player who was masochistic enough to delay their gratification. And that nuke wasn't the first, it was Beethoven's 5th.
If you are fortunate enough to have the option to play a game of commander with more than 4 people, I hope that everyone involved loves the game of Magic as much as the people from Loading Ready Run do, because to undertake that game is as mentally and socially taxing as a United Nations meeting.
Magic is a game complex enough to be Turing complete and it's why I fell in love with it, but what makes it fair is what everyone contributes to the experience.
So according to my experience of the game, the privilege of seeing the win conditions of each deck involved and seeing what those decks can create together makes me think that blue is the fairest colour in Commander, because when your win condition is to see the complete life of a game flash before your eyes, you want that life to be as awesome as it can be for all players involved.
And Blue has the ability to restore the most amount of [life] in the game, because life is memery.
@@Breifcaseguy1 James ruined Matt.
Now that I've played a lot more in person magic I can see where you're coming from more.
White And Blue get fairly hated on. Yes it sucks getting your neck tap danced on by a big ass Dino but at least you had every opportunity to prevent it. If the White or Blue play locks down the game turn then they might as well have just said "Only im allowed to have fun" till the table collectively agrees beat their board in the back of a Denny's
Listening to this, I have been inspired to make a Rishkar ramp/counter deck. Thank you very much.
I think the big difference is that green is usually playing very "fair". Green doesn't prevent you from taking game actions, it doesn't remove your spells from the stack, it doesn't wipe the board, it's slower than red so you have more time to react to it. Green gives you ample opportunity to respond to whatever they're doing in a way other colors often don't. I think the issues typically arise when it's used in combination with colors that prevent their opponents from effectively interacting with them (eg white and blue). Because then they're sitting there saying "ohh, ohh, i'm doing this scary thing, you better stop me!" and when you try they go "nope" and then kill you next turn.
Except Green can "nope" without the help of other colors: fogs, hexproof, indestructable, removal of any permanent (repeatable).
Most of greens interaction is not that widespread when compared to other colors if we are talking about what people generaly think when talking about interaction, but it's there and can blindside the whole table.
Preach! I call this out all the time in my play group. (As the Grixis player who only players Green or White in a few 5-Color decks.)
This is why I play Rielle. I get to discard a bunch of cards only to double my hand size to satiate my obsession with drawing lots of cards and having a big hand. Grandma Rielle can later go in swinging her big staff like a big green beater. Few things are as satisfying as taking everone else out with different win conditions, beat out one in a single swing and burn someone for 20 with Fateful Showdown and doubling back with Flashbacking Conflagrate
Excellent content and that sneaky commentary snuck in there when talking about W is why I keep coming back
Green gets by because they’re not preventing anyone from playing the game until they forcibly remove a player. Blue’s interaction says no. White says pay more. Black says we all sacrifice things and I don’t care. Red jumps over the table and punches you. Green is just the one that has the back foot longest. That said I play WUBRG and the most useful cards for the wincon for post midlife crisis Jodah are the green ones sooooooo
Good deconstruction of the Commander format. However, as a green Timmy player I will proceed to his at you for suggesting to take away my lands, as is expected from our kind.
It's funny though, I've never hated blue for counter spells. I'm kinda sad I usually don't get to be the D.A.D
This man is either a half-elf, or a full elf, teaching us about Magic. The fae folk get bolder day by day...
Never forget that its all about how the color player plays, personally if I see a cool monster and archetype monsters I'm gonna build around that
blue gets wage theft
Land removal exists to deal with green, but the Commander Social Contract on average dictates no one can zap or wipe anyone’s lands. I play red. I am going to run land removal for that reason.
It’s because the green isn’t stopping other peoples deck
The reason why I dislike blue and white's cheats is they target other people's things. Red black and green are just in their own little world having fun lol
Green by itself is fine. Until you start mixing and matching it with other colors!
Green + Blue -> Draw all the cards and counter all the spells!
Green + Black -> reanimate all the creatures, destroy all the things, sacrifice value as much as you want!
Green + red ->
Green + white -> infinite tokens swarming the board and buffing them to be gigantic!
Everyone feels like green is playing fair until they Harrow into Nyxbloom into Hour of Devastation into Craterhoof.
Basically:
White adds ifs,
Blue says no,
Black says I decide,
Red says now,
And green says more.
Black is just the best at tutoring any card it needs while the other colors are good at tutoring specific types of cards, like green for lands or blue for instants and sorceries. Its part of what makes each color unique and how they generally function within the color pie and game
Green is the MTG equivalent to those fake money gurus you see at the beginning of your RUclips Videos. Blue is the Skip button.
Guilty as charged
That ending statement fits my prosper deck to a T. If people recognize me and see my prosper, their usual goal is to make sure as soon as prospers out he dies before I get too much value. The problem for them in that case is by the third or 4th after his first cast I usually have enough of my pieces that will chain together well even without him and allow me to replay him, and then benefit more. It’s a horrible cycle that I apologize for almost every game because yes it’s bullshit, but it’s probably the most fun I’ve had in a card game since pre pendulum in yugioh when I was a innocent casual, before I was chased out by non stop negate floods and hand traps and found sanctuary in commander.
At least when green is beating on you, you saw it coming.
Green starts with a sprinkler and becomes a waterfall, you saw it coming. Every other color gets to play with the fire hose at random intervals of time to make other people sad.
Nobody complains about Green Ramp, but when I do the same in my Minn deck everyone loses their mind.
Wow, I came 30 min after this was posted and there's only 2500 views but also 2500 likes. Very dedicated fanbase. Thanks for the content
Every time a blue player cries, a green player drops another land
I can confirm green players are, in fact, the "bourgeoisie" (english majors I swear to god) and do get coddled a lot. I know because I am one by heart.
Honestly green sort of does everything in magic these days. They make tokens just as good as white, draw cards just as good as blue, damage as much as red and for some reason green managed to figure out that graveyards exist. They may not do that as good as black does... yet, unless its mana from the grave then the graveyard is just another hand to play lands from.
Honestly I don't think green gets the pass as much anymore. But if it did, the reason it does is that while the green player is hiding in the corner beneath a mountain of dudes that work out too much and the entire damn Yellowstone national park, the only real way green interacts is with your face. White the rest of the colors interact with your plays green only interacts with your life total.
I will say, my personal issues with Green come from a player at my LGS, whose decks have a tendency to finish games not with creatures, enchantments, artifacts, instants, or sorceries, but with lands. The most brutal deck I remember him playing was Titania, Protector of Argoth. With multiple lands to bounce/kill his commander, and a constantly resetting Glacial Chasm, repeated card draw from Cryptic Caves, and good old Field of the Dead, nothing the table tried mattered. Counter his commander? He has enough lands to play her 3 more times that turn. Blow up his lands? He replays Titania and gets them back. Exile his graveyard? He discards Kozilek, Butcher of Truth or Ulamogg, the Infinite Gyre to shuffle it away, then search his lands again with Elvish Reclaimer.
It’s really simple why everyone is chill with green. Because them getting the bigger, cooler board state doesn’t prevent others from doing the same, or single out other players as targets for harsh effects.
"Just like real life" Dam, that got real.
"The White players are in a similar boat. The way they get to cheat hardest at Magic is to impose additional arbitrary rules that are either unfairly oppressive to the other players or unfairly helpful to them. It's just like real life."
Okay but I gotta ask for cards that require a vote or headcount does that mean the Black players only count as 3/5ths?
3/5ths? Coming from the color that routinely reanimate the dead and force them to do their bidding and openly work with demons? I suspect that the skeletons, zombies, and other such like thrulls forced into servitude would be none too happy that their masters are attempting to claim that they're the wronged party in this arrangement.
The reason green gets away with it is cause for 10ish years it was the weakest mono color tied with white. Green couldn't open a door without someone running its fade. it was also the weakest color in pairs and triples. Then after first kamigawa block green started getting much better. Then better still, till now it just might be the strongest single color in t 4:10 he game.
I personally have a weird attitude on green in commander, anytime I’m in a low power pod green cards feel broken but in higher power green cards are hardly played. It is weird how all the green effects are just but when you can’t capitalize on it does it even matter?
Funnily enough, green is able to even emulate the other colors cheats:
- removal? Got it (weaker towards creatures, but the green player generally kill you before it matters)
- card draw? Got that in spades
- tutors? Geared towards creatures, but the green creature pool is so cracked that this limitation doesn’t matter
Hell, they even have a bootleg Propaganda in Elephant grass.
What do you mean green is weak at removing creatures, their creatures are larger, so their fight and bite spells kill every other creature
Chris's Pratt and blue please. Give my boy blue some good old hexproof and indistructable
Black (and white to a lesser extent) also have the graveyard cheat (drop the biggest thing, reanimate is one mana), but graveyard hate is the only hate we're told to consistently bring to the table just in case
blue apologism by leaving out that they get to touch more cards than anyone else
"Bias has been and always will be stupid."
Someone smart -
as someone who just made a green/black commander deck based around generating massive numbers of squirrels for ridiculously low cost and then sacrificing all my free squirrels to do whatever I want, ...yeah.
Probably because with green, it’s all literally on the table. You know exactly how they got to this point and watched it happen, which also makes it pretty easy to trip up or take advantage of.
Green doesn't stop you from doing your turn, just makes funny big bois and go face
Blue on the other hand, likes to poop on your freshly washed car with a lot of evil things